Norman Levine. Divergent Paths: Hegel in Marxism and Engelsism; volume I: The Hegelian Foundations of Marx's Method. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006. ix + 249 pp. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7391-1304-2.

Reviewed by Joe McCoy (Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada-Reno)
Published on H-German (July, 2007)

Marx with or without Hegel?

By portraying history as a drama of the increasing rapprochement between ideal forms and concrete human existence, Hegel both augmented and completed the Enlightenment view that history is progressive. Indeed, the Hegelian system represents what is perhaps the boldest claim in the history of philosophy: to have enunciated finally and demonstrably all the forms that reality and thought can take. Contrary to how "philosophy" was traditionally understood, Hegel claimed not just to love wisdom, but to possess it. To many of Hegel's successors, the claim to have articulated all possible forms of individual consciousness and social life was as inhibiting as any of the specific forms of existence he endorsed--such as constitutional monarchy or the right of private property.[1] The story of the Left Hegelians and the collapse of German Idealism is largely one in which certain Hegelian methods were retained, but the total, all-encompassing nature of his system was rejected in the name of increased political freedom and social progress.

Broadly speaking, Norman Levine's volume is a study of how the project of modernity moves forward from Hegel to Marx, and it contains a two-fold thesis. First, Divergent Paths is a scholarly investigation into Hegel's influence on Marx, which, as a historical matter, Levine does not dispute: "From the point of view of the history of ideas I was always convinced of the crucial role that Hegel played in Marx's thought. My research always took the Hegelian presence in Marxism as a point of departure" (p. xviii). This scholarly task is, however, preliminary to Levine's broader philosophical agenda of separating the Hegelian elements from Marx's doctrine: "My own belief is that the Hegelianization of Marxism was a major source for many of the errors of Marxist speculation. While the Hegelianization of Marxism was one of the determinants of Marxist thought, ... the correct epistemology of Marxism requires that Marx and Hegel be decoupled" (p. xix).

Levine is therefore philosophically committed to a "de-Hegelianization" of Marx, which requires a thorough analysis of the Hegel-Marx relationship. Yet the efforts of later socialist thinkers who emphasized or introduced Hegelian elements into Marxist thought complicate Levine's scholarly task enormously, since they were often driven by political motives that blur an accurate assessment of his thought. Consequently, Levine's project requires a second level of disentanglement with an analysis of subsequent thinkers who interpreted the Hegel-Marx relationship for their own purposes.

In chapter 1, "The Historiography of the Hegel-Marx Relationship," Levine gives an overview of the various ways that the relationship between Hegel and Marx has been understood in thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Jean Hippolyte, Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, Alfred Schmidt, and others. I will not attempt to cover all the historical ground that Levine surveys in this extensive chapter. As in subsequent chapters, Levine's analysis serves not only to define more clearly the Marx-Hegel relationship, but it also provides informative profiles of these individuals.

I would like to emphasize two overall features of Levine's descriptions of these socialist intellectuals: First, the various ways in which these individuals have construed the relationship between Marx and Hegel--their decisions to emphasize or deemphasize, interpose or suppress, aspects of Hegel's thought in Marx--are generally shaped and motivated by a political or cultural agenda related to the circumstances of their particular place and time. Consider, for example, Adorno, who among the thinkers discussed in chapter 1 was opposed to mass movements and most free of narrow political partisanship: "When Adorno re-Hegelianized Marxism he did so with the purpose of showing that since Hegel was wrong then Marxism was also erroneous.... He criticized the systematic sui generis. This meant that he not only criticized all attempts to uncover the final goal of history but all collective units such as group, party, workers' unions. Adorno was an apologist for the individual, the particular, the non-systematic, and he took sides with Nietzsche against the increasing collectivism of the age. Adorno saw the greatest threat to mankind in the forces of conformity and understood the strongest defense against mind-deadening conformity to lie in the unique, the fragmentary, the refusal of synthesis" (p. 22). Furthermore, Georg Lukacs wanted "to claim Hegel as a precursor of both Marx and the proletarian revolution" (p. 12) in order to lend credence to this political project, whereas Louis Althusser "needed to sever the Hegel-Marx connection ... in order to achieve a Marxist-Leninist synthesis" (p. 27) and so to oppose the influence of Stalin. But while a mixing of politics and scholarship does not necessarily vitiate the political theory, it is probably not conducive to accurate research.

Second, the diversity of opinion about the Hegel-Marx relationship appears to be driven in part by the difficulty in understanding the total Hegelian project, especially when that project is interpreted in sociopolitical terms. The "Hegelianization" of Marx often amounts to a borrowing of a set of Hegelian claims, methods, or terminology to lend support or luster to a predetermined doctrine and regarding the unpalatable aspects of Hegel's thought as a compromise with tradition or power or a function of the exigencies of his historical period. Hegel's Absolute Idealism holds that no part of reality is fundamentally separate from reason, but there are levels of reason higher than the political as testified by Hegel's elevation of art, religion, and philosophy to the top rungs of the dialectic. Hegel's system was greater in scope than a political ideology or cultural agenda, and he cannot be easily or unproblematically appropriated for those purposes.

Although this volume focuses on the scholarly task of tracing the relationship between Hegel and Marx, Levine's ultimate project is akin to many of the thinkers he analyzes in chapter 1: a renewal or salvaging of Marxist social and political thought in its current state of disarray. This project is a delicate one since political goals can distort scholarly research and predetermine its conclusions. In Levine's view, no other figure clouds the analysis of Marx's thought as much as Friedrich Engels and perhaps no other author shows the perils of politics for scholarship: "Engels completely misappropriated the thought of Hegel. His understanding of Hegelian thought was amateurish, and his transformation of Hegelian dialectical methodology into a natural philosophy was a simplistic distortion ... Having misconstrued Hegel, Engels then advanced to the misapprehension of Marx. When Engels argued that three laws of physics, the negation of the negation, the transformation of quantity into quality, and the interpenetration of opposites, not only governed the functioning of nature but of human history as well, he led to the malformation of Marxism. Whereas Marx stressed human praxis ... Engelsian Hegelianized Marxism eliminated the element of human activity and replaced it with the metaphysics of natural philosophy ... Engelsian Hegelianized Marxism became, for the most part, Stalinism. Even though the Diamat of the Soviet Union rejected the influence of Hegel on Marx, it nevertheless remained loyal to Engels's three natural dialectical laws. Engels contributed to the rigidity of Soviet Marxism, a rigidity which led to the collapse of communism in Soviet Russia" (p. 6). Although Levine does not discuss his broader philosophical goals at length in this volume, he presumably hopes to provide a corrected Marxism free from this Hegelian legacy and to contribute to a restitution of a political regime without the rigidity and brutality to which "Engelsian Hegelianized Marxism" led.

Chapter 2, "Engels's First Appropriation of Hegel," is an intellectual biography of Engels, and it describes the bourgeois scion's gradual transformation into a left-wing intellectual in terms of his encounters with Hegel from 1838 to 1842. Although recognizing the belief that Marx's and Engels's thought complemented each other was politically necessary (see, for example, pp. 89-92), it was nevertheless false and destructive.

What, according to Levine, is the crux of Engels's mistake with respect to Hegel? Engels's intellectual limitations prevented him from understanding that Hegel's Absolute Idealism holds that objective reality and the individual consciousness that comprehends it are both partial aspects of Spirit (der Geist), whose structure can be completely articulated through dialectical laws. Engels took Hegel to mean that it was objective reality--the material world, history, society--that conformed and developed according to these laws with subjective consciousness being more or less an effect of those material conditions. As Levine states: "Embracing the belief that Hegel-himself was an expression of rational pantheism, the young Engels emphasized the role of objective, abstract forces. He argued the case that the objective, the real, was rational, or that reality was a predicate of reason. Therefore, objectivity and reason took precedence over the individual." Levine writes: "When the young Engels wrote of history as a canvas upon which the Idea printed itself, he puts forth the concept of historical necessity. Rational pantheism committed him to the belief that the unfolding of the Idea was the controlling motif in history. The other side of this assertion is the conviction that it is necessary for history to develop in accordance with the Idea, or necessity was a principle of historical development" (p. 113). Levine illustrates Engels's misunderstanding of Hegel with regard to the logical notion of negation, or more precisely, the negation of the negation, in which Spirit comes to recognize its identity with the objects of consciousness which it previously viewed as distinct from it (see pp. 112-115). Engels, however, vaguely conceived negation as any difference, contrast, or conflict between two objective, material conditions, or social forces, a conflict neither engendered nor resolved by individual agency or will.

The difficulties for Engels in presenting "an amalgam of Young Hegelian politics and right-wing Hegelian philosophy" (p. 112) ought to be apparent: If subjective consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon of material conditions, then not only would it be completely incapable of transforming those conditions, but it is also unclear how an individual could become aware that his material conditions are somehow problematic and ought to be changed. Thus, Levine cites Engels as the point at which Hegel's "panlogism," the view that rational though impersonal laws governed all reality including individual behavior, entered into and distorted Marx's thought. In contrast to this view, Levine associates Marx more closely with Bruno Bauer, another Left Hegelian, who represents the polar opposite of "panlogism" and grants subjective consciousness the decisive role in shaping human history and the material world.[2]

The third and final chapter of the volume is entitled "Marx's First Appropriation of Hegel." It tracks Marx's encounters with German philosophy through his student days and examines his dissertation, The Differences Between Democritus' and Epicurus' Philosophy of Nature, an early example of his attempts to distinguish himself from Hegel while simultaneously appropriating Hegelian methods and terminology. Levine shows that, in relation to Hegel, Marx understood himself as a modern Epicurus. That is, he interpreted Epicurean materialism, skepticism, and individualism as an advance in Greek philosophy in the wake of the systematic philosophies that emerged from Plato and Aristotle. For example, just as "Epicurus proved that even after a total philosophic system, philosophy had a future" and "after the great age of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, philosophy opened up a new horizon in the figure of Epicurus" (p. 221), so too Marx "saw specific features of Hegelian thought as opening new horizons for philosophy. Hegel was not a final statement but a new beginning" (p. 200).

How specifically did Marx characterize his own thought through the interpretation of Epicurean philosophy? According to Marx, Epicurus held that man's practical needs, his will, and his whole subjective apparatus determine the scope and character of his knowledge of reality. Epicurus subordinated theory to practice, and in this sense, he was a modern in relation to the classical Hellenistic philosophers: "The a priori of Epicurus's theory of knowledge was that mankind's theory of the universe was ultimately determined by conceptual and ethical boundaries, but within these preconditions ... Epicurus ... was a materialist and a believer in sense perception. Epicurus was an atomist ... and so he was a materialist in terms of a philosophy of nature. Epicurus held that concepts, even moral prescriptions, were the organizing frameworks of sense data. In addition, Epicurus was a naturalist, for he maintained that the end of life was happiness and that the most efficient way to achieve this end was to live in accordance with nature" (p. 201).

Epicurus's advice to live according to nature and to seek pleasure and tranquility circumscribes the limits of man's theoretical knowledge, and this view not only leads him to deny the existence of the gods for tranquility's sake but also: "Naturalism served as the basis of Epicurus's rejection of the existence of meteors. Since the ideas concerning meteors were capable of causing fear and anxiety in humankind, Epicurus denied the existence of meteors because they interfered with psychological peacefulness.... Self-consciousness was the controlling force in the interpretation of the external world, either in the shape of meteors or of a divinity" (pp 133, 202). Epicurus's materialism thus appears to be a kind of default theory of nature. Although the hypothesis that everything is composed of atoms cannot be directly confirmed through sense experience, it is vouchsafed practically as the least perturbing and fear provoking conception of nature available. Indeed, it is conceivably an emboldening hypothesis, since, in the absence of underlying structures or forms in nature, mankind seems to be granted the power to reorder and restructure reality according to its will.

According to Levine, this is the philosophical paradigm for Marx vis-à-vis Hegel: A materialistic conception of nature and the elevation of human will and intellect, that is, the elevation of human subjectivity, as the fundamental force in shaping reality. Along with Bruno Bauer, who "saw self-consciousness as the demiurge of the world" (p. 190), Marx assigns priority to subjective consciousness, and in this respect, he is diametrically opposed to Engels's panlogism.

Chapter 3 is an exciting intellectual portrait of Marx, and Levine masterfully weaves together many strands of his research to show how Marx understood himself with respect to Hegel, the history of philosophy, and his own contemporaries. Whereas Engels represents a misunderstanding and so a corruption of Hegel's philosophy, Marx intentionally shifts the emphasis of his thought to subjective consciousness. However, both positions are really departures from Hegel's system of Absolute Idealism: For Hegel, Spirit is ontologically prior to both objective existence and subjective consciousness, and similarly, the Notion or Concept (der Begriff) subsumes the logical categories of particular and universal. Consequently, since Spirit is constitutive of objectivity and subjectivity, the labor performed by subjectivity was ultimately a self-discovery or recollection through its attempts to know the world. The labor of subjectivity is productive in the sense that it produces itself in order to conform to and realize its identity with objective reality. For Hegel, therefore, the labor of the subjective that motivates the dialectical articulation of all reality is a delicate balancing act between the productive freedom of Spirit and the necessity in the formal structures through which it must realize itself.

In Marx, and Bauer, the ultimate identity of subject and object that defines Hegel's Absolute Idealism is abrogated in favor of augmenting the freedom of the former and denying the necessity of the latter. Yet Marx appears to liberate human subjectivity at the cost of disconnecting it from reality. Allowing practical concerns to dictate theoretical matters leads Epicurus to the view that meteors, and presumably anything else that perturbs the mind and provokes fear, cannot exist. This view is not only theoretically incoherent, since meteors evidently exist, but practically dangerous, since tranquility is best achieved by being mindful of what threatens it. Similarly, materialism and the priority of subjective consciousness seem to give human beings the power and license to modify the world, but without knowledge, consciousness cannot distinguish its theoretical conceptions from imagination or fantasy. The question for Marx must be what purchase reason has on reality in advance of its attempts to modify reality.

This volume is intended to be the first in a series on Marx's relationship to Hegel throughout the former's whole intellectual career. Overall, Levine's study of Marx in these early years is a detailed, well-researched, and stimulating account of his intellectual development and self-understanding. In particular, his in-depth account of Marx's dissertation in chapter 3, which presents Marx's understanding of his project at an early stage, and Levine's assessment of Engels's thought in distinction to Marx in chapter 2, are especially thought-provoking. However, the portrait of Marx that emerges is similar to those of the socialist thinkers Levine discusses in chapter 1, and involves an unstable mixture of political causes and a philosophical system not suited to account for them. Perhaps subsequent volumes of Levine's work will deal with the tensions that evidently plagued Marxist thought and practice.

Notes

[1]. For a recent study of Hegel's possible concealment of his true political views, see Domenico Losurdo, Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns, tr. Marella and Jon Morris (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), reviewed by Joe McCoy, "The Hidden Hegel," in H-German, at http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=265291159461380.

[2]. An excellent study of Bruno Bauer's thought is Douglas Moggach's The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer (Cambridge University Press, 2003), reviewed by Joe McCoy, "Hegel Turned on his Side," in H-German, http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=244341103556470.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-german.

Citation: Joe McCoy. Review of Levine, Norman, Divergent Paths: Hegel in Marxism and Engelsism; volume I: The Hegelian Foundations of Marx's Method. H-German, H-Net Reviews. July, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13442

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